Category: Life

Eulogy for this body

I’m in Romulus, Michigan’s cheapest hotel, sitting cross-legged on a queen-size bed in a too-small tank top and old underwear. It’s my last night in America.

The past eight months have been forming a callous of iron and red mercury around my shoulders, melting and dripping down my back, straight as an arrow, like a cat of liquid mineral with its diamond claws stuck into me, like a river of lava that erodes, digests the green mountain. I can feel it, with its hands and jaws around my inner organs; it’s pulverizing them, crushing my fleshy insides into a pulp that sloshes in me when I move, slowing me, dissolving me. I’ve been crippled, do you see? But my outward appearance is the same; the result is both a feeling of destruction and a feeling of falsity. My blood has been thinned by toxic and hard metal, monsters with solid gold eyes are running their teeth along the marrow of my bones; but what do I have to show for it? When I’m asked if I’m alright, I have to answer yes, yes, of course, because how could I ever prove otherwise? Where are my thickened scars, where is my silver gun, what is my war?

In the evening, I do up my laces and walk out the hotel’s sliding doors; my hands are in the pockets of my best jacket. I take small, measured steps, pouring my liquified heart out, millimeter by millimeter; it pools in my shoes, leaving red footprints along the sidewalk. I walk half a mile in one direction, and then I walk another half-mile in the other. Strips of tar flanked by concrete, a Hilton, a Holiday Inn, a gas station, the highway, airplane hangers beyond. All around me, people fixated on the road ahead, holding onto steering wheels, doing security checks on jets and puddle-jumpers. I think: You know. You know, Emma, you could keep going. You keep walking through the fields, past the highway and the hangers, cut through suburban backyards. They wouldn’t know you were gone, not for days. I pause, hovering, on the border between the end of the road and the undeveloped, blank land ahead.

Hey, God? This is your child speaking; my name is Emma, do you remember me? Do you ever think of me? I’m here now. Did you know the things I’m capable of are incredible? They are. God, did you know the things I’m capable of are terrifying? Oh God, they are, they are.

I want to open myself up, break open my ribcage like a nut, like an oyster’s shell, and scoop out my collapsed lungs onto the pavement. Pull out the threads of my arteries, uncoil the sausage-thick guts, pick at the phlegm and acid of my throat and stomach walls. Tip myself over until I am drained clean. It’ll feel good, so good, to be empty; it’s like when love is returned, becoming your shape and home, it’s like waking up with wings that open in the daylight like a flower. I’ll seal myself shut, my body wiped down and made anew, and keep going. And though I will be empty on the inside: everything else can grow.

It’s spring, today; so let the seeds of wildflowers take root in the warm coats of tissues leftover and occupy the space where my lungs were. Let the air lick down my throat, through my burned temple thorax and settle in my calves, like some small, soft-eyed animal. Sunlight and stars in the back of my neck and down my back: a new spine. Let me make a circlet of wet soil and stolen blood, like a quietly determined school-aged girl sowing daisies into a crown, and hang it close to my throat to quench the worst of my thirst. A layer of sweet-smelling yellow grass to replace muscle and fat, to keep me warm on the nights when I suck up campsite fire and store it where my heart was. Snake skin and bird feathers, river water and clay, a new shape, a new structure. I’ll lower my head, eyes ahead, and run, quick, slick, across the ocean, salt accumulating in the hollows left by my intestines, sea anemones and pink, porous, breathing coral giving me new bones; the reflections on the water traveling from the soles of my feet to the foot of my soul, patterns and color washing away the last of these months from me. I’ll be a self-made angel with a halo of rose thorns and lilies, a natural android with magnesium-rich metals, veined crystalline circuits.

I’d be better then. I promise. I’d be new, that heart of fire and those wildflower lungs don’t need anything but the air in my legs and the sun on my back. Gods and men, keep your hands and your miracles to yourselves. Write my old body a pretty eulogy. Say: She is made in her own image now. Then lift your eyes and watch me run; watch me rise.

Cut your hair

I examine my body in mirrors. In a year’s time, my hair has grown longer than it’s ever been; near the ends it feels like old hay, thick and unhealthy. I run my hands through it and think: this is Medusa’s hair, when she is cleaning herself in seawater at night, running across the white sand, her snakes with their eyes half-closed, dormant, shedding scales dried out by salt. Under the fluorescent light of a hotel bathroom, my hair resembles a horse’s mane, caught and collected against my neck, tangled, dirty; but during the evening, when I spot my silhouette on the wall, I see no hair, only fur down a wolf’s back. Prey or predator, girl or Gorgon; I still haven’t decided which I am. I am pulling at Penelope, undoing her work, ripping my hair from where it’s been threaded with silk and perfume, into her tapestry. I am running away, on the shore, hovering between water and land, my body flipping, switching: sweet, gristly, tender, crippling.

My mother is consoling me; she holds me, she lets me rest on my head on the hollows of her collarbones, my hair falling over her arms. “My God,” she says, “so much hair. It seems like a curtain, more than hair.” I think of actors in porcelain masks on a stage, appearing and disappearing as a velvet curtain rises and falls. For some characters, I bare my canines and carnivore’s nails;  electric and vicious, leaping up to kick flat in the chest, splitting the braid of blood that knots hearts. For others, I slip into yellow moon eyes and milky mouth; demure and gentle, so loving it’s as painful as any wound. Kindness like my monster Medusa bathing in the dark, to save the fishermen; cruelty like a hero, under the sun, with a shield of mirrors, putting a sword to her neck and swinging. They both have their own evils.

I’ve learned that a necessary consequence of living is the disloyalty of the heart; but my spine will always be mine. My feet and teeth, those too. And my hair, of course: short, long, unwashed, clean, wrapped around my body, pulled across my face. It springs from me like Aphrodite from the sea. Whatever I am, carnivore or carnation, moon or monster: I cut my own hair.

雨降って地固まる

There’s honey in her hair, and, on the corner 0f her mouth, sea salt. She stretches like a tiger, when she wakes in the mornings. Her smile is a knife, bitter and tragic; her smile is a slab of butter, warm and fragrant, dissolving. Her hands are villains on the run; her hands are suns from the spring months. Her skin is softest at the crook of her elbow, where her blood hums, pomegranate red, and on the drum of her belly, where her stretchmarks glow, milky silver. Her heart is a cliff, iron ribbons and deposits of metals along the edges; rocks between her ribs, for each time she’s cried without comfort, flowers in her lungs, for each time she’s danced to no music. Love is the hardest work, but she does it gladly. Eyes like trees in childhood, bites of sugar; voice like song in the tundra. Sea salt along her spine and dotting her temples; a gun at her back, underneath her shirt, loaded with bullets made of honey.

Where I Am Now

My favorite days are like earth after rain, rich with soft soil smell, a little warm, a little damp. I make tea but forget to drink it, and the smell of it, heavy and sweet, fills the room. I spent a Saturday sobbing, once, and the Sunday after dying of laughter. It served as a good reminder: putting on clean jeans and making it outside, that’s heroic, sometimes. My heart is a silly thing, half-formed, still catalyzing, but it’s still my heart. I am no Achilles, no Alexander, but I don’t mourn it, this mortal that I am, these places where I am now.

On bad days, there isn’t a prophet alive who can help me out of the darkness, but my mother’s face, blurred almost beyond recognition by an Internet connection strung across the Atlantic, does the trick. When I look at her, I remember how she never cried the day I left home, and I now realize that was the greatest kindness she could ever have showed me. I’m realizing a lot of things, as of late, and they make me want to punch myself in the face and kiss a stranger, in equal measure.

My body, this year: the back of my ankles dry, the curve of my wrist warm, some parts of me like peeled oranges, yellowing wheat, husks of cinnamon, belly flab, short legs, acne on my chin; I should get more sleep, I should eat better. It’s hard, and getting harder; nobody ever told me that. Even for the stars in space, life is nothing but resisting inner pressure and external gravity, inward and outward forces. But I think life can’t be measured according to difficulty, along a spectrum of extremes. I am not better, I am not worse. What I am, where I am now: that has yet to be determined.

I am nineteen in two hours.

Not A Good Day

A pair of young women came to calligraphy class today. They stood up to introduce themselves: slender, rounded arms, soft sweaters, pleasant voices. We practiced writing earth: pronounced chi, thick lines and threads of black, flecks like kicks, dense and hard. One of the women stops behind me, steadies herself on my shoulder, leans in and takes hold of my writing hand, guiding my strokes.

Her touch is all over me, gentle, and suddenly I cannot breathe. I feel like I’ve been robbed blind, like my inner organs have been removed and replaced with seawater, dark matter, heavy liquor; I am light, I am lightless. My ribs open up and invite it in, and there are branches around my waist, and blood up to my neck, and I’m overwhelmed with it, staying power, saving grace, movements like the wind on rooftops, because she’s touching me, her slim, cold hands are on me, her liquid-smooth, heart-soft palm is on the crushed metal of my shoulder blade, her fingers are resting in the gaps between my knuckles, like warm air rushing to fill an empty space, and she’s telling me that the fourth stroke ends in a stop, not a curve.

It’s been six months since someone’s touched me.

I need to control myself; I can’t control myself. I assumed this unease was temporary, but now it’s getting too familiar with me, softening the vertebrae that care for the frame of my body, licking at the falling walls of my mouth. I can’t control myself. I can’t control myself.

Fire, honey; liars, money. Put me to sleep; set me on fire. I’m so stuck within this life that a woman’s hand is enough to rip me apart. These hours I live are not whole; these places I go are not homes. What am I living, where am I going? I CAN’T CONTROL MYSELF.

Me: earth when it is dying, bruises that are flowers, empires of leaves and dog days that shatter, dust and dust and want and want. I was going to be a hero, but why would that be, when I am made of the stuff the galaxy wouldn’t put in its stars? I sit on my bed, dark outside, back to the wall, and I look at my hands, where I saw worth, once. Now I only see weapons.

I go to sleep praying that, during the night, I’ll change into someone better than this. When I wake I take in a single breath, my eyes open like gunshots, and I know: nothing has changed. You can’t control yourself; who would ever touch you.

Adultlike

I am traveling. On the second floor of a train, knees pressed to my chest; I have not slept in two days, my mind is a terrible place.

The trees are barely visible in the swollen dark, but thin branches spread up and out, gracing the curves of my peripheral vision; they tremble a little, a colorless, sleepless parade spiraling out along the tracks. The train is an incautious and indelicate creature, shaking hard, making disconsolate sounds. My face is dirty, and my hair lies in a dry coil at the base of my neck. Sweat dotting the insides of arms, coffee stains like animal stripes on the sleeves of my down jacket: it’s easy to see where I have been, the symptoms and saviors of my life are all about me, visible, deducible. I’m a victim at the scene of a crime, silhouette traced out in yellow tape, what’s the cause of death? And what are you going to tell me when I peel myself off the hardwood floor, scratch at the fingerprints of blood at my collarbone and ask where the nearest subway is, if I can go home now?

I’m not getting any rest tonight, that much is certain. So I pile my bags at my feet and keep watch, as wide swipes and swatches of land come and go. Patches of city, blurred out by motion and the gray morning hours, as though partially erased by a fidgeting and forgetful goddess. Spots of yellow-orange light flooding warehouses, parking lots, silver trucks. A factory, huffs of smoke, expanding and retracting in the air, like blood flowing down the tar roads or rainwater tonguing lazily at rock, just like your legs stretching out from underneath the sheets, curling around the piles of slightly wet laundry at the foot of your bed. Train tracks clot and congeal, dipping underneath bridges, around lakes that shine like oil spills in the night, skimming the surface of the planet, taking us along with it: anywhere, everywhere.

I don’t know where I am, sometimes. I’m caught between worlds, pinned underneath a membrane. Living feels like an out-of-body experience; see Emma walk, see Emma run. Someone I don’t know is walking around in my clothes, and I hang from traffic lights, watching them cross the street in the old jean jacket I took from my mother, in my black slacks and chapped lips. I won’t grab at their shoulders, yank them into an alley and steal it all back, I won’t pull my fleshy, stretch-marked skin over my knees and talk with my real eyes. I don’t feel safe, or trustworthy, not yet. Is this what growing up feels like? Is that what growing up is (deciding: I am dangerous)?

Cities split into suburbs: neat rows of pastel-colored houses, lawn ornaments. Then the sidewalks disappear and green-bright, nut-brown fields whiz past, lines of buds tended by old hearts in wife-beaters, blessed in the springtime by the bees that lay low and silent now, pressed into the cells of their golden hives. Boarded-up convenience stores, iceberg blue water towers, red barns: a little chewed-up at the edges, but all the more beloved. These towns don’t warrant a mention on the map, but there are men here who will be born in puddles of slick blood on cotton blankets and who will be buried near the fringe of trees, caked by cold and dirt, underneath Midwestern petunias; they will live out the entirety of their days in homes that are more unknown to the rest of mankind than the outlying strips of the universe.

It’s seven in the morning, now. I’m eating an overpriced chocolate bar, rolling sugar in my mouth, and my head lolls against the seat, and I am fighting sleep. The train turns a corner and I see the river; the first river in over a year. It hits me hard in the face, a fistful of gunshots, gold dust. I never realized that those threads and layers of water, strung out across the bowl of the land, could mean so much; my heart grows in some indeterminate but definite way. The sky, rubbed raw, is softening slowly; there is sunlight coming through the creases, cracking the ribs in the curvature of the Earth, soaking in like ink through paper veins, like time oxidizing faces, fire through the cover of trees.

I am in a moment of my life and I can’t decide if I like it or not. I’m awfully confused. But, all things considered, this is a pretty world to be confused in.

I remember a good song and tap it out on the carpet, I finger the ticket stubs in my pockets, I watch warehouses, men, rivers and it reminds me of the places I have been, the people I have been in those places. I have been the dollop trollop, I have been lady disquiet, I have been the corpse under your floorboards. I have been the songbird, the murderer, I have been the child lost in the forest. I am dangerous now, but I have been safe. Where do I have to go, to be safe again?

I am traveling. I have not slept in two days; my mind is a terrible place.

Some emotions, more thoughts, and many, many questions

I’m learning to read Japanese; each step across the page slides cleanly through me, sun cutting across the undergrowth. The characters fill me to the brim with the sticky reminder of their shape and meaning, stuck to the nape of my neck like the odor of spoiling summer fruit. I stand over a desk in the clouded glow of early morning, tracing their forms with a fingertip. Hiragana, katakana, kanji. I thread them together and run my tongue through them, and they are as new and tender to me as the the birth of the first moon is to the insecure god. I want to own and preserve these characters, cup them close to my chest; I want to mutilate them, too, test their breaking points. Indecision takes root. I remember that boy from high school; how the only thing I could tolerate less than his sadness was his joy. Someday I will be sitting on my haunches at the beach, dipping my hands into sand, writing him a love letter onto the body of the coast that the sea’s blood will soon take away.

My father doesn’t approve. Why Japanese? he asks me during our telephone conversation, his voice ground into pulp by some faraway satellite. Anxiety breathes deep and pure into my stomach; I press my forehead to the window glass and I thank God, not for the first time, that he is not here with me, and that he cannot see my expression. I look too much like my mother when I am upset.

Japanese at nine o’clock in the rain, footsteps up the sidewalk like the drip drop of a bar’s painful piano, my lips twisting at the language as though insistence could return color to the dying leaves of my thoughts; Japanese when I find myself on the floor, crying, folded up, creases and edges pinched to a close. Japanese because when all else fails, at least I have the frustration of a liar’s love to keep me alive through the change into the shattering season. Japanese because I am unhappy and there is no one left to blame.

I come up with a story for each character. Sa is a ghost, cooling touch and grace, wiry frame, wound up by childhood death. Tsu is the soft-eyed and slow-smiling boyfriend I’ll never have. Hi is a town near the seaside, done up in pastel and gold, where mermaids come to be buried. Ku is the secret that would break my dear mama’s heart.

In response to the first draft of my paper, my professor writes: Your paper has some emotions, more thoughts, and many, many questions. On the one hand, I like this structure, as I’ve said. On the other hand, the high ratio of questions to emotions makes me wonder whether the questions are protecting you from an awareness of feelings.

I have to laugh. Oh, the transparency of my doleful and doe-eyed deceit! A few thousand words and two weeks of class, and this man can see into the fleshy glass of my sinner’s heart. The questions are protecting you from an awareness of feelings. Damn straight they are. Bless the questions that keep me from feeling.

Na is a good girl who loves raspberries and spelling bees and dies of alcohol poisoning at nineteen. Shi is an orphan in charge of a city’s courier system. Ka is a white cat with the gift of speech and a duty to mankind. Chi is a fleet of transport trucks on the highway, going a thousand different ways, to opposite sides of a country. A is all I want, all I have ever wanted: a little house, by a river maybe, a good kettle, and someone warm who wouldn’t mind holding me when I’m tired.

Learning to read Japanese reduces and simplifies me, stripping me down to a few elements, as though I were a chemical experiment in the hands of the scientist, a clunky metal some lab technician will cut into with a diamond knife. I sit and forget everything about myself (a great feeling, the greatest of feelings, for a monster like me). The look of the characters, the sounds they carry in their curves, the way they fit in a sentence, inside my mouth. I cover each of them with the flat of my hand, and then slowly reveal them to the light, trying to say their names as quickly as I can. They don’t promise me more than exactly what they can give, but there’s a warmth to them that indicates, perhaps, the possibility of things to come.

In Japanese, someday I will: read a letter, talk to a cat, ask for directions to a town where mermaids go to die, listen to the advice of a ghost, buy a kettle, seduce a sweetheart boy, greet the conductor of the train that will take me somewhere (somewhere I won’t break my mother’s heart or disappoint my father or cry in the dark or run myself down into the slick pools of thick tar I mistake for rivers). Somewhere faraway where it snows the whole year and little houses aren’t too expensive and the locales smile often. Somewhere I can save myself, questions or no questions. And then maybe the scales will fall from my eyes and be replaced with stars.

Que Todo Lo Invade

We have spent fourteen days in the new apartment.

During the evenings, my mother stands at the kitchen counter and cuts packing tape with safety scissors. She empties boxes and begins cataloging her belongings according to their worth. She re-opens envelopes holding birthday cards, wedding invitations, notes of congratulation and bereavement, handwritten letters. Sometimes she’ll call me over and read select bits of them out loud. That’s from Pamela, you know, from the company. This is from my old psychiatrist. Billy Kelly from Birmingham. Granduncle in the Canary Islands. Look at how this starts: Dear Carmen, your little girl is beautiful… The names and words bring me the nostalgia of familiar dog days, of lawns and tiles, drives and forests behind apartment complexes. Often they come with soft images and smells rather than concrete memory. Tina’s protruding blue eyes, the carpet around a fireplace, quiet. Sometimes, if the memory is a good one, if the sender is a good one, my mother smiles. She will even tip her head back for a moment, eyes closed, losing the sick tension, for once. Then my mother puts both hands on the paper and tears it in halves, and then in fourths. She offers no explanation, tossing the pieces in the trash as she does the empty cardboard boxes and the sweaters shrunk in our new washing machine. It was hard not to flinch, at first, but I have learned.

We have driven to IKEA twice. The first time I was struck not by the amount of stock or customers, but by the number of babies. Infants held against the breast, the back, in arms, sleeping in strollers as a mother and father debated over sofa cushions. They looked up at the paneled, light-filled ceiling with steady and unthinking devotion. Did they mistake it for the backdrop of the hospital where they were born? Did they return to that sudden and pivotal time of blood, humidity and love? Did they start anew?

On the way back, my mother drove fours hours in the dark. Mi cerebro no reconoce el cansancio de mi cuerpo, she said. My brain doesn’t recognize the tiredness of my body. I craned my neck, looking for her expression in the light of passing automobiles, but that curve of cheek and steady hand could belong to anyone. I stared at her as a young child would, searching for a mark to know her by. Where are you, mother?

The second time, my mother tried to make the same return trip on one fill of gas. As the needle dipped close to empty, my mother called to me. Her voice can give the space around me form and structure wherever I am – even when I am curled up in a car, caught between a dying radio, black mountains and the poisonous nighttime. I took off my safety belt, something I once nearly slapped my brother for doing, and wrapped my arms around the seat immediately in front of me, the seat my father once occupied. Should I stop? she asked me. We are close to empty. I knew that if I told her to stop, she would. Instead, against all proper judgement and reason, I said: go. You can make it. 

My brother has cried once. Don’t believe it, I whispered to him. You know the truth. He allowed himself to be held, but only for a few minutes. When he lifted his head he was calm, but not expressionless. In his face, in that small face, I found the still and unassuming bravery I have needed for so long. I have taught my brother the alphabet, the difference between a diphthong and a hiatus, multiplication of fractions. Now, I try to teach him to survive, I try to teach him the truth, only to find that I am the one who still needs teaching.

We fight, my mother and I. At first it was often, but now it is only occasionally. We argue with one another as angrily as ever, but we do it while sitting at the table, drinking breakfast tea, or while washing the dishes. These healthy, domestic scenes give us a sense of order and responsibility. Sometimes we forget we don’t want to hurt each other, and we fall into the old roles. I am the lithe and disdainful villain, and she the towering specter, baring her teeth. But mostly we are good. As simply as children, we have made peace with one another. Even the bad guys have something to protect.

I think of what I want for us often. I picture us taking the subway to the movie theater, the three of us standing in a circle, shoulders touching, packed in close together by the weight and substance of strangers. We buy stale popcorn and orange soft drinks, we rush up stairways, we arrive a little late but nab perfect seats. Quirky, heroic characters, rolling streets where teenagers meet to construct secret bases, soundtrack that lilts and booms at all the right places, killer lines spoken by poor delivery men and gunslingers against bucolic scenery, deaths in the arms of the schoolboy who swears revenge, absolutely no romance – we see the film that my mother will remember as being “beautiful”. We take a taxi cab home, and my mother is talking and smiling, she is laughing at the bits from the movie my brother reenacts. Every once in a while, she turns to look at us in the backseat, and I can see her clearly, even in the dimness. I recognize my mother, my true mother, half a century old, hands touching her knee, her face, smiling and shaking her head: the best of the scores of women she has been before and will be. When I recognize my mother, my lofty skepticism and system of cruelty leave me, if only for a short while. When I recognize my mother, I am reminded of the worth of this day, of all days. No, I do not live for her. But I do live because of her, in more ways than one.

The moving men and my mother position a bookshelf slightly to the right. Why don’t you put it in the center? I ask, standing in the doorway in my pajamas. I want that space for flowers, she says. I think of the flowers in our old apartment. They died from neglect in no time at all, the wooden flower boxes rotting in the rain. My mother makes a sweeping motion with one hand, gesturing towards the entirety of her home, all the walls and children who have made her their caretaker. I’m going to fill this entire place with flowers.

MISTER COUNSELOR

A week ago I went to talk to my school counselor. Getting help, any kind of help, is something I’d been considering for years. Often I would fantasize about confiding in a woman sitting next to me on the high-speed train to Madrid, the gentleman in the supermarket check-out line, a little-known writer of Sunday columns, or, in a fit of absurdity, Plato (this lead to a series of letters addressed to the most kind Mr Plato, which I keep behind my bookshelf, as furtively and as shamefully as a degenerate child would hide the instruments of deflowering).

Earlier this year I somehow managed to tell the story to two of my classmates, while seated in a swinging lawn chair. I had my eyes on the checkered retractable awning the entire time, not because I would not look at them, but because looking straight in front of me meant coming face to face with my reflection in the glass-paneled doors. The confession was a failure; it left me feeling squalid and ruined, for reasons I will not go into here. I’d like to make clear that it wasn’t their fault, however. She was a darling slip of a girl, all flashing skirts and floral smile, a milder, kinder Lady Green Sleeves. He was a debonair Holmesian character, with an ancient, Romulus air and Roman profile to match. They were gentle with guilty, doleful me, but they were also unprepared.

Afterwards, I lost all sense of the story itself. Where had it began, where was the development, the character designs, the pacing? All the narrative elements that I’d so carefully picked up along the years felt artificial to the point of obscenity when placed against the backdrop of my mother’s relapse and my parent’s divorce. I found that the anger and weeping of those summer days had wiped out the details, leaving a muddled strip of brightly colored, bursting memories. There was that far-away sun, the ice cubes in my mother’s tropical drink, that pair of well-meaning but terrifying policemen (“don’t cry, you’ll get double the gifts on Christmas”). Humiliated, I found that I could no longer distinguish right and wrong in that mess. Where had my sense of justice gone? Where was I, all that time?

Often I was (and I still am) filled with sudden and powerful remorse. I couldn’t believe what a big deal I was making out of this, when in dim and dusty Africa children live and die in white refugee tents. I choked it down, and I tried my best to be good. That period taught me that I’d never possessed humility, and that even if I was not a true egotist, I had cut corners. I learned the pleasure of existing, and that home, and all the extensions of it (everywhere I stepped became home – school classrooms and warm bookstores, marble plazas and tree shadows) deserved genuine respect and admiration. I lost, for sure this time, my fear of associating with other teenagers, and I found that the grinning flashes and little peaks in their intonation, those indications of their goings-about, their evenings at the squash court, their exchanges of loving-constructed in-jokes, brought me joy.

I know I have not been an excellent daughter, sister, or friend. I have been distraught and sordid, but through all the ugly times and door slams I have stayed, if not strong, than at least firm. My one good quality, perseverance, has stuck by me, through, if you’ll permit me the small cliche, thick and thin. Though I am often unsure and confused, I don’t mind being proven wrong, I don’t mind a chiding “No, Emma, look here, it’s like this.”

But still I couldn’t find the sufficient courage to confide in someone. I wanted so badly just to have it be out there, not in written form but in spoken word, syllables leading to the sentences of my shame. I tried to imagine the prototype of the conversation, and each model I trashed as being too casual, too flighty, too stiff, too horrific. I have been accustomed, for as long as I have lived, to think through absolutely everything, which I now realize has caused me to miss out on the spontaneous memory-making of childhood. So when I spotted my school counselor at the reception area, speaking to the secretary, it was in the spirit of impulse and necessity (and a third thing, which started in the pit of my abdomen and exploded out my mouth) that I called out his name. It was with shock that I discovered that he recognized me, despite the fact that we’d spoken only twice, and with even greater shock I found myself asking for an appointment with him.

This leads me to the events of the past Friday. I sat in a straight-backed chair and talked, for almost two hours. He put in a word here and there, but mostly he smiled, hands cupping his face. My breaths were quick and raspy, and my fingers, curled in my lap, twitched and fussed. When I remember it now, I have to laugh at the pretty picture we made: a schoolgirl in sneakers pulling out her whole life story like colored scarves from a magician’s mouth, eyes running and darting, and a middle-aged man with a beatific expression and nodding head. The words, miraculously, did not fall apart under the pressure. I found the bravery of a literary ancestor; I spoke as though I were reading poetry.

At the end of it, my school counselor looked at me, not with pity, as I’d expected, but with something akin to wonder. He said to me, “Emma, you’ve been through a lot.” I’d never been told that before, and with a rush I realized that it was all I’d ever wanted. All I had ever wanted was that acknowledgement, that I had suffered, and that I had worked hard, to defeat something greater than myself. I was a child, looking for an approving tap on the head, any indication that I was doing okay. I came to terms, in an instant, with it all, and my life up until that moment unfolded before me, palpitating and beautiful, in the true sense of that word. He said it again: “You have been through a lot.” I told him, smiling: “No. I have been very happy.”

COUNTER-EARTH, OR, WHAT I HAVE WANTED TO WRITE FOR A LONG TIME

Parties are always a strange experience for me.

A few Sundays ago I attended the going-away party of a lovely girl. For six hours, approximately thirty youngsters aged sixteen to seventeen congregated and diverted themselves inside a suburban home some ten miles away from the city. We wiped down chairs wet from the previous night’s rain and spread pattered tablecloths on plastic patio furniture, where we, a collection of elaborately coiffed adolescents in glittering jean jackets and floral skirts would eat room temperature cheese pizza and microwave lasagna. Underneath the roar of today’s pop music, the boys and girls pile onto suede sofas, sucking on freeze pops and making faces at the camera. Later on I marvel at photographs of myself seated on the curb in the darkness, or next to a few classmates, unable to recall when they’d been taken. The whole time I am there, in fact, I feel as though I am the patient in an operating theater, aware despite the anesthesia, looking up into a world of masked physicians and bright scalpels that I am undoubtedly a part of but somehow very far away from. Only by virtue of my age do I belong here, among brethren born the same year as I, and raised in similar conditions. With the exception of this, they and I could not possibly be more different.

Throughout most of my childhood the only parties I attended were my own birthday celebrations, and so I am delighted to receive invitations for these gatherings. Like many females in identical positions, I enjoy cleaning and fixing myself up, like a young cat preparing for a nighttime excursion into the underbrush. For a few hundred minutes worth of my fellow’s little games and conspiratorial smiles I will take great pains to make myself presentable. I have a desire perhaps greater than that of most to give an impression of general likeability. I have never had great friends; in fact, I think of them as I do mythological creatures. I’ve never been to one of those sleepovers where giant tubs of ice cream melt on counter tops while little girls in polka-dot dressing gowns share confidences like tiger-eye marbles. The few attempts at good, solid friendship I have ever made have ended in failure or separation. It’s not only my bad luck, no –

Dear readers, you who see me only through what I tell you, know this: for my all of my life I have suffered from chronic social anxiety, and it has crippled me.

A BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM

A striking young lady in a kimono-style iceberg blue dress. Well-meaning but much too needy. Absolutely impossible to get along with, but count on her to crawl into your bed in a thunderstorm. Stuck with what appears to be super-super-super adhesive glue to Emma’s back.

How to explain, how to explain! Riddle me this, dear readers: girls skin knees on trees, lose themselves over gutsy boys and shopping sprees, dream of afternoon tea with the marquis (petite bourgeoisie!), glamorous anchorwoman jobs at the BBC (hello dearies, here to discuss the Nepalese rupee), girls are devotees of rouge and a number 53 lipstick called red sea, girls work late nights for doctor’s degrees and pretend they are Nancy Drew holding the skeleton key, they are named Bree, Rosalie, Marie, Amy, Katie, they plea and disagree, they call each other sweet pea, they leave when they so will it and (JeSUS is that Tommy Lee macking on Deirdre?) feel free every day of their lives.

Riddle me this: how is it that I fulfill the biological characteristics of What A Girl Is, but I’ve never felt like a proper one? What-what-what do I lack?

A girl riddled with canker sores and beta burns all along her brain-blood barrier, destroying her ability to speak. A girl lacking a Dark Ages backstory to complete her babydoll image, opening her mouth and big surprise, nothing comes out! I was a nice enough girlie, but so stricken by social fear that I could not dial a number or visit a classmate’s house without the mass and temperature of my insides going up by 500%. I accepted without complaint that I’d never be accepted by my compatriots and that the best I could do was appeal to their sense of morbid fascination. I wanted to be the endearingly strange gal, but all I ended up doing was convert myself into a zoo attraction.

A MAXIM DEEP AS MUSCLE MEMORY OR MOTHER’S SMELL

Grade school circa 1999, twenty or so children seated around a whiteboard, the teacher seated on a stool and crying out: Be yourself!

WHAT THEY DO NOT TELL YOU

Human beings are not the stony stuff of legend. They are not as imperturbable as sentences on the page or rocks in the kidneys. Their characters, with enough determination, can be melted down and remade. Yourself is not permanent.

How to explain, how to explain! Allow me to confide in you, dear readers: I wanted so badly to be THAT PERSON! That person who won’t leave troubled people alone, who’d loan time and heart, homegrown lass in Mama’s cologne, a pure tone like whale song, a little lady who’d drag strangers out of combat zones and across stepping stones, not a bee drone humming along in dumb solitude, no groans, no moans, just an eager, lovable child who knows how to love and how to apologize, girl chock-full of sweet bones. And if I am honest –

I WANTED THIS MORE THAN I’D EVER WANTED ANYTHING

AND

THOUGH I CAN STILL CHANGE ONLY LITTLE OF THE WORLD AND ITS COMPONENTS, THERE IS NO REASON I CANNOT BECOME WHATEVER IT IS I WANT

“To seek, to strive, to find and never to yield.” I smiled as hard as schoolchildren on bicycles pedal up slopes. I took a real interest in other people’s lives, picking out the bits they loved from the rolling jumps of their jargon. I was as wholesome as Thomas Aquinas, asking for forgiveness without shame. There was no gentleman’s commodity I did not bargain with Mephistopheles for, no code of conduct I did not kill myself to emulate. I spent bus rides with Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff and How to Make Friends and Influence People, I slept with them in my arms. I fought tooth and nail to speak cleanly and honestly, at all times, in all situations. The beauty of genuine human interaction: it is something of which I loved to think.

Oh yes, I pinned her down, my horrific elephant girl. We stared at each other, her body buckling under the pressure, but who had fear in her eyes? My twin in everything, insufferable and petty, she was that part of me I sought to disguise, but in a room empty but for me and her, she was the stronger of the two. In my attempt to be extraordinary I had forgotten her, the great eye of all my hurricanes, that secret frontier! In a moment of clarity, I spared her. In all honesty, how could I have laid my hand on her? She pardoned me, and I her. Despite all her faults, that little lady, living three inches inside my forehead, is the best pal I’ll ever have. She was often nervous, at times destructive, but always persistent. That perseverance took physical form in the deepest parts of my gut. It said: WHO YOU ARE NEVER HAS TO BE INCOMPATIBLE WITH WHO YOU WANT TO BE.

Parties are always a strange experience for me. I do my best to be good, but of course I am afraid, I, the simpleton in shiny shoes. I laugh at the roughhousing and the poolside bickering, one madcap lad grabbing another by his shirt collar and delicately dropping him into the clear water. I listen attentively to reenactments of daring escapades, recipes to all possible combinations derived from alcohol and soda fountain alchemy (let me tell you about this rum and cherry coke I had at a bar in Benicassim back in ’09). The core of me has not changed. My responses and little smiles are as giddy and foolish as ever. And yet I have managed to put myself at ease. There is a eager quality to my speech, now that the fright is gone. I am no spitfire, but I am comfortable among them, these dragons and amazons, perched upon blue leather loveseats and fishing in the fridge for Nutella and celery sticks. Above all else, I have come to know that these are children (red-blooded courtesans and courtiers, winking from unlit streets!) I can easily adore. In all probability they will never come to adore me, and for this I do not blame them. I am certain, however, that some other people, some other day, maybe will –

When I walk home, I look back, watching them leave like birds, and I think, arms crossed behind my back, eyes turned towards the road: Oh. How far it is that I still have to go. My elephant friend squeezes at me and, in one of her rare communicative moods, responds: How far it is, that you have come.